Bunch of crotchety old fools in here let me tell you. I said where do I get the Internet I got writing lessons I got to keep up. Mrs Doodlewhatsit was all, ‘you got TV and you got bingo what you need Internet for that’s for kids’. The only time I get online is pizza night and that’s got be shared with Alfred Stott and his dumb ass Facebook.

So we will now learn how to write a real ghost story. You will want to do this to scare your wretched ungrateful children into line or to have something to do when you’re 3 days into lunar orbit and run out of drinking songs. Note this SUBTLE ART of DEFLECTION. You basically have to say everything backwards to the way you want the audience to take it. By making yourself sound like a complete idiot you will have everyone convinced. GHOST STORY JUJITSU! I will give you the MASTER STEPS.

STEP ONE: Always start by saying of course you don’t believe in ghosts and hauntings and all that shoot. Because the more you say you don’t believe in it the more they will believe everything you say. “Of course ghosts are a load of crap” immediately gets the response ‘Yeah? Maybe they ain’t!’ The audience wants to argue and this is the first thing they latch on to.

STEP TWO: Now you have to throw in some Essence Of Humble Times. This was back when you were ‘ a poor student living on noodles’. Or you ‘were stuck without a job living with your crazy religious parents’ or ‘had this job in a dingy office’. Never ever place the story when you were running the local Wells Fargo and sniffing coke off a hooker’s tits. People are suckers for hard luck stories and somehow being a bum makes you more attuned to the spirit realm. Or maybe rich people don’t get haunted, I wouldn’t know.

STEP TWO and a BIT: If you do go for the student/hippy/wacko angle you should throw in some weed or booze or whatever kids do these days, Quaaludes? But you always got to say that you didn’t notice any effects. Like ‘I was up to my fifth bowl of Quaaludes but they hadn’t kicked in at all’.

STEP THREE: So the place you’re at has a really bad reputation but you don’t think much of it. Like ‘people said that my front room was where 3000 Indian braves were squashed by a giant alien skull but the rent was pretty cheap so I took it.’ Always make the bad stuff sound real bad and your nonchalance real flippant. Because then they think that you deserve what comes next!

STEP FOUR: Keep it mundane! Whatever you were doing that night has to be really dull. Like slopping out the pig pen or arranging the fork drawer so the forks are all lined up. No one ever has ghosts when they’re disco bumper bowling.

STEP FOUR and a BIT: This is where you need a pardner. Lots of ways to play this – a younger brother works great, some people use the dog but whoever it is they have to be Robin to your Batman. You get to excuse all kinds of stupid moves in convincing the pardner that there’s no such things as ghosts. Fool me once fool you twice or fool me again or whatever young Bush said.

STEP FIVE: Now something’s definitely not right but you are going to shrug it off. Sure, some problem with the aircon makes it below zero which is why the cat is now hoisting itself up the wall backwards speaking Latin and I reckon it’s the wind that is making those cupboard doors slam in Morse code U R  G O I N G  2  D I E. Same old.

STEP SIX: Here’s where your pardner is going to suggest something sensible like let’s get the hell out or don’t you go wading into the dark pit where the screaming is from. Because then you have your excuse to go do exactly that dumb ass thing just to show them up.

STEP SIX and a BIT: Sometimes you can use the little brother wandering off as the excuse. Or sometime you think you hear him calling from down the Hall Of Doom, when really he’s still straightening those forks.

STEP SEVEN: All systems nominal, we have ignition! You can drop in pretty much anything now, although creepy little girls in period clothing has served well for the last couple of centuries and damned if people won’t be seeing creepy little girls on Mars in the year 3000. Apart from that bitch of a daughter of mine I don’t know what it is that makes little girls the worst case scenario for floating upside down in the basement gibbering.

STEP EIGHT: Robin having already got the hell out of Dodge you are right behind him and somehow end up in the Bat car first. Get out of there!

STEP NINE: the next day everything is normal and you look stupid.

So let’s check out this writing system in action!

“Now I don’t believe in ghosts or any of that but something weird happened back when I was out of school one summer back east. I just couldn’t find a vacation job and my parents were giving me the evil eye every breakfast about it. So when I heard they needed somebody to straighten the forks at the local piggery I figured the low pay would be offset by a break from the toxins at home and maybe be enough to buy me some underpants.

There wasn’t too much competition for the position, probably due to rumors that circulated about the place. The farm was supposed to have been built over an old graveyard and pigs would occasionally go missing only to be found picked clean and buried some days later. Joe at school reckoned he’d once seen a hand come out from the muck reach up and reel in a squealing pig, trotter first, but then he also said his dead mother slept with him at night which was a better reason to avoid the guy entirely.

I got the job. One other guy was already working there called Smiley on account of his being a bit simple, an oversized kid but seemingly harmless & not much for conversation. I asked him about the graveyard and he just shrugged it off. He’d do the spoons while I was on the forks, the manager would do the knives during the day. Did I mention this was the night shift?

The night in question was extra muggy and the pigs were making a hell of a racket over something. I’d soon learned that pigs enjoy bacon as much as anyone and there was always a smaller or sicker animal being noisily worn down by the pack. Smiley was in a foul mood and kept bending the spoons. My forks were tangling around each other for no reason and it was taking all my concentration to keep the prongs on the straight and narrow. The racket from outside kept on the up and up until it reached a crescendo of porcine howling and hooting around 3am.

Suddenly the noise from outside went dead quiet. Not a grunt, not a squeel – quiet like a gunshot. Once the shock wore down a little I started to feel curious. Something was going on in the yard and even while real scared I had to know. Grabbing one of the bigger forks I started out to the back door.

‘No! You no go!’, howled Smiley, ‘Under yard bad pigs! Pigs coming!’

Somehow the warning made me more curious to find out what was going down. Plus I figured it was my job to reassure Smiley that everything was going to be just fine.

‘Just fine’, I murmured.

There was no light in the yard – I guess I’d never been out this way at night. I stumbled softly to where I knew the gate would be, rolling the fork along the wire for sonar. Nothing stirred, no sound. What on earth was making the pigs that quiet? Maybe I could reach in and tap one, see what happened. Right then I heard the front door slam shut. Smiley had exited the scene, at speed. Coward I thought.

Through the gate and tiptoeing gingerly through the yard, I kept sweeping my boot to touch a pig. But the slush kept on further than I seemed to remember – or just deserted? As my eyes adapted I could catch a soft pink glow coming from up ahead, at ground level. What would you do? I went towards it.

It – was a ditch – no, a hole – straight edged – a big hole – light was coming up out of the ground – pink light – a kind of haze and – there were the pigs. Lined up. Lined up in rows. Making…

Stairs.

Damn Alfred Stott wants his Facebook now I’ll have to finish this next time.

Nope he says I have to write about Chick-Lit.

(I was going to write about how to make a rock opera. The second wife and I once went to see a show called HAIR. Years later the third lady and I saw one called CATS. I said at the time I should write a show called CAT HAIR and it’d be twice as good.)

Now you are going to say, Vincent, what would an old man like you know about writing ironic self debasing novels for young women? Well you see it’s like a chair you bought from IKEA. You get a bunch of struts and some Allen keys to assemble the chair and the instructions are written in gooby gooby with some pictures. Believe you me, a space mission is just like that except you are floating upside down. There ain’t no man in the agency better than me at piecing together a robot arm and this is no different.

So let’s open the box and make sure we have all the parts.

PART A is the fat ugly girl. She’s not really that fat or ugly but she has to be kinda dowdy and drink a lot of fruity vodka for this thing to work. That connects to PART B which is the cute guy who was burned in a previous relationship and is now cynical. You need to use ROD A which is their sibling like relationship which conceals the real attraction that PART A is hiding for B. PART C is the bitchy boss woman which goes up above PART A and connects via ROD B which is the exploitative employment contract. Got that?

OK now you need the large ROD C which is an impending marriage between PART B and PART C which everybody knows is a real disaster waiting to happen. This needs a nut at either end. PART A should at this point hang helplessly below the the other two, and the structure should seem pretty stable.  Here’s the turning point: We have to bend it a bit to accommodate PART D, which depending whether you have purchased model 34 or 56 is either PART A’s hairdresser BFF or a comedy gay guy. Either way the trick is to have PART D leverage PART A into taking the weight off ROD A and passing their combined weight onto STRUT D that makes a new connection with PART B that counteracts ROD C.

If you do this just right PART A can be seen at an angle where she suddenly doesn’t seem nearly as fat, ROD C breaks off, PART C flies off out the window and ROD B swings around to elevate PART A up to where the bitch was. You now have a nice join between PARTs A and B on two levels. PART D cries and claps its hands like an idiot.

You do that on a space walk.

Now I want to get back to my idea for a Rock Opera.

Some people might think the plot or the music is the most important thing. They would have not seen CATS. It didn’t have a plot and the music was appropriate for a lot of people dressed up as animals being sexy on each other. I would do something which was more classy. And this starts with the right costumes.

You would enjoy this guy singing.

This is opera, like in Bugs Bunny. I go for the ‘olde tyme’ costumes myself. I want them to have powdered wigs like in real operas. And horned helmets. We need a mechanical dragon. Two dragons.

Now you’re saying Vincent, this frock coat and powdered wig thing is for Mozart or something. But I don’t think so. I think the kids like a show and wigs have been keeping people entertained a long time. Maybe some parents will come along, more money for me. No matter what age, people like a classy act.

Wigs and frock coats are always class.

Maybe I could glue some horns onto my helmet. Just saying.

Dinner bell’s ringing, gotta go. But listen, you and me make this opera happen next time!

- Vincent

Traditional Sci Fi.

First you need a nautical romance from the nineteenth century. This is the hardest step. You can’t just pinch some Conrad or Melville, they’ve all been raided already and besides the plot of Moby Dick is kind of familiar. In the library there’s sure to be some old tome by Captain Pugwash that no one read in the first place. I find the best ones are in prison libraries but that’s another story.

Now it gets easy. We make up a substitution chart.

• For ’ship’, write ’spacecraft’
• For ‘Africa’, write ‘planet’
• For ‘African’, write ‘alien’
• For ’sea’, write ’space’
• For ‘island’, write ‘moon’.
• If in doubt put ’space’ in front. Like ’space food’.

So ‘At first light the ship made port on the coast of darkest Africa’ becomes ‘At 0800 hours the spacecraft touched down on the dark side of the planet’. ‘The African chief waved his spear’ becomes ‘The alien chief waved his blaster’.

Already you got a pretty damn fine sci fi novel happening, although you might need to change stuff like ‘dusky native girl’ to ‘2 headed Venusian bride’ or something. The neat thing is that ‘pirates’ stays the same although you might need to swap ’space blaster’ for cutlass. Not everyone even bothers to do that. There! You’re L Ron Hubbard!

New Wave Sci Fi.

Now this can be tricky but you just have to keep two things in mind. New wave Sci Fi comes from the beginning of the 70’s (heck now I’m showing my age) and so it’s filled with a lot of Age of Aquarius gobble gobble. Remember the way kids used to protest in the 60’s then became advertising executives soon after? Right. So imagine if those protests actually meant shit. Like changed the government or something. Got that? So like Logan’s Run (the book – not that stupid movie). It’s got kids ruling the place, mad bikers, bombed out Washington D.C. You know the drill.

The other thing is you have to write two stories. But really they’re the same story, but you have to be maybe a kid and a grandma at the same time. So you do kid for two pages. Then you do grandma for two pages. Then the kid again. Now every time you do the kid you use italics. These two guys don’t hear each other until the end of the story when suddenly it’s hello the kid is a robot. You end up with a book where the writing changes every couple of pages. That’s called new wave. Get some practice and you can do three or four switcheroos in the same book.

The cool thing is that there doesn’t have to be a story. Just throw a whole bunch of vague stuff together. If you want you can throw in stuff about ‘little boys’ at random and be William Burroughs.

Alternative Realities.

These days all the cool school are making up alternative realities. What if Hitler won the war? What if I had told Cindy Lou she didn’t have a big ass? Who knows?

Now this one is a natural. You’ve got some hooch hidden behind the flight console and the captain catches it. Well you say somebody else put it there. He says you’re the only one in that flight seat. You say OMG there must be a Russki hidden somewhere on board. He says ain’t no place for any Russki. You say maybe there’s a hidden panel. And so on. Thing is, you start with a little lie. Then you make up a bigger one to cover the first one. And you keep going until you are sure that Napoleon flew jet planes over the whole of Europe. Except when it’s a book you won’t get taken off the mission.

Now you’re saying Vincent, I am no liar like that. But this is for Science Fiction. You have to get into the swing here. Like those 9/11 Truthers, doesn’t matter if it makes sense – just as long as they can link two things together somehow, they are on a roll. (So the bad guys would have to spend weeks drilling explosives into every wall to make the towers go down – ‘yeah but there was a lot of deliveries that week’.)

Dystopian Worlds.

Shit happens. Your job here is to spread it around. Like you are writing one of those $100 stories for Readers Digest but instead of it being Things That Really Get My Goat, it’s everything gets everybody’s goats plural. So there was a line up at the local DMV the other day and when I finally got to the end they say that at 90 years old I shouldn’t be driving anyway. And no they don’t care if I had flown three shuttle missions I was too old. Well what if the whole world was like the DMV and if you were too old you couldn’t get a license? But what if this was a license to screw? And you had to wear an orange hat with TOO OLD FOR A LICENSE on it? And with robots?

So what you do is take some little thing and blow it up into a whole big bitch. Throw it all on. The weather is crap, the gin sucks, the television is black and white and the girls aren’t much to look at. You need one guy that stands in line and then they say no and that’s when he loses his cool. And he kicks butt until the robots come and put him in the nursing home. You can add as much bad stuff as you like, the more the merrier. Like that 1984 book, the only thing that lacked was an electric cattle prod and you know he wanted to stick that in.

That’s all we have time for now but later on I’ll come round and let you know how to write a rock opera. Thanks for letting me write the blog this week! This is Vincent signing off!